A barrel of a long gun such as a rifle or shotgun is traditionally cleaned by attaching a solvent-soaked patch to a long cleaning rod and passing the patch through the barrel of the firearm. The patch typically comprises a small square or circular section of cloth. The patch is attached to the cleaning rod by feeding it through a slotted tip attached at one end of the cleaning rod.
Nevertheless, despite their widespread use, conventional cleaning patches are not particularly well suited for cleaning firearms. Conventional cleaning patches, when being passed through a rifled barrel, for example, tend to slide over the lands and grooves of that barrel. This results in residual contamination in the barrel, even after intensive attempts at cleaning
Because of the shortcomings of conventional patches for cleaning guns, there has been recent interest in utilizing swabs as an alternative means for cleaning firearms. These swabs consist of fiber wads wrapped around the ends of wooden or plastic sticks. The fiber wads are sized to hold an appropriate amount of solvent and, at the same time, to tightly fit into the barrel of the firearm being cleaned so that the fiber wads contact the entire inner surface of the barrel. At the same time, the swabs are relatively inexpensive, and can be thrown away after just a single use. Nevertheless, while very useful for cleaning handguns with their shorter barrels, a swab would need to have a very long stick length in order to be useful for cleaning long arms. Unfortunately, the sticks used in conventional swabs are typically not of great enough strength to support this kind of extra length. That is, they would be likely to bend and break.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for apparatus that allow conventional swabs (with sticks) to be utilized to clean firearms having relatively long barrels.